Toilet brushes are typically used to swirl cleaning chemicals around a toilet bowl, and then to scrub the sides of the bowl with those chemicals or water, so as to assist in removing stains along the bowl sides. Typically such brushes have their brush bristles permanently affixed to the handle of the brush.
While these brushes do help clean toilets, there is a problem with regard to storing them between uses. After using such a brush a consumer will typically attempt to rinse off the brush by swirling it in bowl water. In some cases this rinsing process will be repeated through several rinsing flushes. While this rinses off most of the cleaning chemicals, feces, urine, and stray bits of paper typically found in the toilet, the brush still normally retains some contaminants even after extensive rinsing. As a result, the brush may develop an unpleasant smell or appearance during storage.
Regardless of whether contaminating materials are present on the stored brush, the brush will be dripping wet immediately after it is used. The consumer may therefore try to shake the brush over the toilet to try to remove most of the excess water, and then quickly move the brush over and then into a storage bucket or the like. However, this can still result in some dripping of liquid on the floor as the wet brush is moved from above the bowl to a bucket or similar storage container. In any event, this requires a consumer to obtain and find a storage place for that bucket or storage container.
To try to overcome such problems the art designed a variety of assemblies in which a permanent brush handle was provided, but the brush head was formed as a disposable and replaceable element. See for example U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,031,673, 5,471,697, 4,987,634, and 6,094,771. See also PCT application WO 01/15587.
Some of these devices designed the disposable brush head as a small biodegradable head that could be flushed down the toilet after use. Some also impregnated the replaceable head with a cleaning composition to avoid the need to separately add a cleaning chemical.
However, some of these devices relied on relatively weak frictional attachments to connect the replaceable brush head to the wand or handle. The head could accidentally and prematurely fall off during use before the cleaning was complete (for example during vigorous scrubbing of a stubborn stain).
Also, certain types of such brush heads could cause clogging problems with sensitive toilets, or be unsuitable for use with sensitive septic systems. This might be due to the size of the head, or to extra structures such as bands used to hold head parts together.
To try to avoid this, some formed their brush heads from extremely water-degradable material. Unfortunately, because that material was so water-degradable it sometimes began to fall apart before the cleaning process was done, particularly when aggressive scrubbing was attempted. For example, the Hygenihouse brush head was so degradable that their use instructions cautioned that the portion of the bowl above the water level needed to be cleaned first, indicating that if one washed the portion of the bowl below the water line first the brush head would disintegrate before scrubbing above the water line could be completed.
Another deficiency of the prior art was that many of these devices relied on relatively long handles (so as to provide a brush about the size of a conventional toilet bowl brush). This took up quite a bit of space, thereby rendering the device less likely to be acceptable to some retailers, and, in any event increasing the cost of shipping and packaging.
Still other such devices relied on attachment mechanisms that projected relative to the brush head in a way such that they could have the holder portion of the wand contact the bowl. This created a risk of scratching certain bowl surfaces.
Further problems with some of the prior art replaceable brush heads included reliance on very tiny brush heads (thereby increasing the time needed to clean the bowl), or reliance on structures that were difficult to adequately quickly wet (thereby increasing the time needed to dispense impregnated chemical).
Still other devices could not be produced efficiently with automated equipment. With those, the cost of the devices were such as to make them less competitive in the marketplace.
As such, it can be seen that a need still exists for improved toilet brushes of the type having replaceable, disposable brush heads.